>
> I made a test that shut off the power to the hard drive completely
> instead of entering the Standby mode. That showed a current usage of
> 75mA in idle mode. I don't know, however, if the hard drive wears out
> faster if we cycle the power that often...
>

I have a pdf spec sheet for the tohiba drive I use and it said it would
eventually damage the drive if you shut it down while it was spinning - it
would typically fail after doing it 20,000 times (which is kind of worrying
becasue my laptop cuts the power to its spinning disk when it shuts down).
The pdf didn't say anything bad about shutting it down when in standby mode
- the only difference is it is completely turning off the electronics isn't
it? - the disk has already stopped spinning at that point.

I have written some code to do a dynamic low water mark and that seems to be
working really well so far. It can add up to 10 seconds to the play time
before having to read the disk again. I need to do more testing, and sync
with the latest build though, and I don't know how to generate patches yet
(I'm not a unix person... yet).